This is the joint website of Women Against Rape and Black Women's Rape Action Project. Both organisations are based on self-help and provide support, legal information and advocacy. We campaign for justice and protection for all women and girls, including asylum seekers, who have suffered sexual, domestic and/or racist violence.

WAR was founded in 1976. It has won changes in the law, such as making rape in marriage a crime, set legal precedents and achieved compensation for many women. BWRAP was founded in 1991. It focuses on getting justice for women of colour, bringing out the particular discrimination they face. It has prevented the deportation of many rape survivors. Both organisations are multiracial.

A man whose teacher admitted abusing him over six years was told that his claim for government compensation should be kept at the lowest level because his experience was a "one-off incident" and "consensual", the Guardian can reveal.

Steve Foster, now in his 40s, made a claim to the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority (CICA), the government body responsible for compensating innocent victims of violent crime. Foster, who applied after speaking out about the abuse he at one point suffered two or three times a week at boarding school, said he was "incensed" by the authority's handling of his claim. "This was the most clear-cut case imaginable", he says. "The man had confessed and been added to the sex offenders register. I had, on every level, been confirmed as a survivor of abuse. And they were saying I had consented."

[Women Against Rape is strongly opposed to lifting a complainant’s anonymity. See quote below.]

The Times March 10, 2007, Frances Gibb, Legal Editor

Ministers are looking at giving the Court of Appeal the power to remove the anonymity of serial rape accusers when cases involving them come before judges, The Times has learnt.

The idea of a power to lift a complainant’s anonymity, to be used only in exceptional cases, comes after a case last autumn in which a man’s conviction for sexual assault was quashed as unsafe and his accuser, dubbed a “serial and repeated liar”, was named in the Commons.

But the Solicitor-General, Mike O'Brien, who has been master-minding the proposed reforms, told The Times: “The Government has no plans to remove anonymity for complainants in the vast majority of cases.”

Today's measures can have little impact in the face of a culture that systematically neglects victims of sexual assault

Guardian 15 April 09
by Libby Brooks

I have only heard one person expounding at length that women regularly "cry rape" in order to enjoy a free ride home in a squad car after a night out. And he was a detective sergeant. Certainly, a tiny and overexposed minority do confect allegations. Many, many more do not. This is Britain in the spring of 2009. An estimated 47,000 women are raped in this country every year. Between 75% and 95% of them will never report their attack. Of those who do, only a quarter make it to court, and there face an abject conviction rate of 6.5%. By my most conservative calculations, this results in 191 of those 47,000 ever seeing justice done.

This Community Care article is based on interviews with members of the All African Women’s Group and Black Women’s Rape Action Project. The article exposes the hidden reality of how women seeking asylum from rape are increasingly facing an apartheid system of benefits, healthcare, housing and social services.
http://www.communitycare.co.uk/Articles/2009/06/01/111690/asylum-seekers-experiences-of-social-services.html

01 June 2009 | Rowenna Davis Community | Care

Asylum seekers often complain that social services are not receptive to their cause. Rowenna Davis reports on obstacles faced by social workers and on organisations that help